Kermit Roosevelt

Kermit Roosevelt, Allegiance. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015.
Jadaliyya (J): What led you to write this novel?
Kermit Roosevelt (KR): In 2007, two years after the publication of my first novel (In the Shadow of the Law), my editor said to me that he wanted my next one to be set in the Supreme Court. I told him I wasn’t sure I could do it. I would love to write about the Court, but I didn’t want anyone to think I was revealing secrets from my time working there. (I ...

Bio

Kermit Roosevelt is a professor of constitutional law at the University of Pennsylvania. Born in Washington, DC, he attended Harvard University and Yale Law School. Before joining the Penn faculty, he clerked for D.C. Circuit Judge Stephen F. Williams and Supreme Court Justice David Souter and practiced law in Chicago. His experiences clerking and practicing law informed his first novel, the national campus bestseller In the Shadow of the Law (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005), which won the Philadelphia Atheneum Annual Literary Award and was selected as a best book of the year by the Christian Science Monitor. His most recent book is Allegiance (Simon & Schuster, 2015).